


Alternative Ending No. 5

by Jewel2065



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-22
Updated: 2018-03-22
Packaged: 2019-04-06 15:21:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14059818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jewel2065/pseuds/Jewel2065
Summary: An alternative ending to the Fallout 4 main quest.





	Alternative Ending No. 5

Alternative Ending No 5  
By Jewel

 

The last few weeks of Shaun Smith's life were spent in a drug-induced haze. He lay on his sickbed, computers beeping about him, largely unaware of the passage of time or the sense of hushed worry that permeated the air of the Institute. Father was dying and Mother spent much of that time seated beside him reading aloud from a variety of old-world books even though Father heard little of it. 

During her rare absences from Father's side, Mother mostly kept to her room. Only occasionally – usually during the night cycle – was she seen pacing aimlessly about the halls and departments, her pale, pinched features speaking volumes as to the level of her distress.

The day-to-day business of the Institute drifted along without any input from the Director or his heir. Dr Ayo dealt with such matters as were essential and demanded attention but otherwise the department heads operated their own little empires while they all waited for the inevitable. 

This state of affairs drifted along for three weeks before Father finally passed away and the beeping machines fell silent. 

The entire human population of the Institute gathered in the atrium, for the most part silently mourning the passing of an icon, many not really sure what to do since this changing of the guard had not been experienced in their lifetime. Only Mother was absent, having chosen to remain with Father; and only Dr Ayo and his coterie of supporters were talking among themselves – not particularly a surprise since everyone knew Dr Ayo was extremely angry that he had not been appointed as Father's successor.

There were therefore no witnesses when the contents of the biosciences laboratory quite literally vanished into thin air with a crackle of blue light.

No-one gathered in the atrium understood what was going on when the lights flickered and went out leaving only the battery-powered emergency lights marking the corridors and the lift to the relay room. It was only when they began to shiver in their lightweight uniforms that the scientists realised that there was no heating – and no air conditioning filtering and recycling their oxygen either.

Someone ran up to the Director's suite, and returned breathless to report that there was no sign of Mother, only Father's body lying peacefully in his bed. 

Dr Ayo despatched people to check on different aspects of the situation. As reports filtered back the picture became increasingly dire: There were no synths other than the coursers and Gen-2s left; the entire Biosciences crop was gone too, along with all medical supplies and ammunition, and all but a handful of fusion cores from the storage rooms. That left only the equipment and supplies in the storage facility – which was inaccessible thanks to the sabotage that had taken out the power. 

Eventually it became apparent that the Binet family and the courser designated X6-88 were also missing.

When the emergency generators ran out of fuel – at best in perhaps a week's time, if they had all been fully fuelled and well-maintained – they would then have no light at all and no way to open doors to the apartments or departments. The population would be trapped in limited space and with dwindling supplies.

Bitterly Dr Ayo recognised the position they were now in: Trapped in close quarters with a very good prospect of starving to death; in fact – albeit without the constant irradiation and the risk of attack from all sides – their situation now was not vastly dissimilar to that of the world above. They did not even have the benefit of their senior biomedical expert since he was missing along with that hell-spawned bitch. 

Determinedly, he set the population to work, firmly of the view that keeping them busy was the best thing for now. The remaining synths were set to salvaging the limited equipment accessible in the atrium, and cataloguing the supplies available. Meanwhile the scientists utilised the salvage to construct a small generator which would give them a short term breathing space whilst they considered more effective ways to survive this nightmare.

That generator would be used to open the doors to the apartments and labs, but its use after that would have to be strictly limited to essentials: Doors would have to be locked open to reduce the wasteful use of the generator to power them. Likewise, lighting would have to be limited to essential areas only.

There were some seeds in storage which could be used to grow crops, but that was obviously long term and would require resources to achieve results. There were plenty of crates of dehydrated food supplements and purified water at the canteen which, with rationing, would last for several months – but the elevator would require a great deal more power than the little junk-generator could provide and without the elevator they had no way to access the deeper storage facilities and no way to escape their concrete tomb onto the surface. 

Access to the bathroom facilities in the apartments would temporarily stave off Ayo's biggest concern until the little generator stopped working. He suspected that the sewage system required fully functioning electrical systems to operate properly, and if that was the case, the diseases that would result from having to live amidst their own waste would kill them quicker than malnutrition.

His expectations for the long term survival of the Institute were very low indeed. 

Fortunately, at least for now, there were no outbreaks of hysteria or conflict as everyone worked together to increase their chances of survival. He did not expect the present calm to last once the scientists realised just how poor their situation actually was. He estimated that would happen when Ayo ordered the decommissioning of the synths in order to preserve their dwindling resources. 

He was fairly sure he would not survive once the population rebelled; he was under no illusions as to his personal popularity, after all. 

__ __ __

 

Mother had been far from inactive in her time in the Institute. She had done Father's bidding in the world above; and she had carried out assignments on behalf of the various department heads. 

She had completely resiled from her association with the Railroad once they had served their purpose in helping her reach her son; and although polite to the synths as much as she was the human population – stating when questioned that it hurt no-one for her to be polite to everyone around her no matter their status – she did not appear to consider synths to be equal to humans.

When Father named her his heir she had been distraught at the prospect of her son's death and barely paid any attention to the rest of it. As Father's health declined sharply, no-one was surprised when she began to spend all her time with him, her devotion and distress obvious to everyone.

Mother was a charming woman and it was no surprise to anyone that she spent a great deal of time with the Binet family; after all, Alan was a kindly man who, along with Dr Volkert, had been a friend to Shaun for a great many years. 

Only X6 had been present when Mother slaughtered her way through the raiders at Libertalia; at that time, it was his unspoken thought that Mother would have made an excellent courser. 

He was with her when she visited the Minuteman settlements and he saw that she dealt with the surface folk just as she did those of the Institute, giving of her time and energy and resources to aid them as needed. He thought that she was too generous to the unworthy, ungrateful population. He was surprised to realise that he thought similarly of the Institute humans in the context of their demands upon Mother.

X6 was also with her when she decided to investigate the beacon that led to Nuka World. Mother used the salvage she had obtained all across Nuka World to build a radio beacon and establish yet another Minuteman outpost for no doubt unworthy and ungrateful settlers – but that wasn't until after she had obliterated the overwhelming and entrenched enemy who had so offended her by their keeping of collared slaves. She walked away limping and low on ammo and he finally understood that Mother was in fact an apex predator and that it was her contribution to Father's DNA that had made the coursers possible. His admiration for her abilities had reached the point of worship.

Once Father named her his heir, X6-88 understood that task was to serve Mother in whatever capacity she required: Father had given into her hands the future of the Institute; she had already decided the future of her Commonwealth. As Father was forced to take to his bed and entered his final weeks, and the Institute passed into Mother's, it was a simple matter to accept her leadership and follow where she led. He hoped she might one day lead him to another challenge such as Nuka World had been.

Of course no-one asked X6-88 for his opinions and observations beyond the minimum required for his reports to Father and Dr Ayo. 

Instead, the Institute saw what she wanted them to see: A grieving mother only recently reunited with her son and now facing the terrible prospect of losing him so soon. 

They forgot that she had created a teleporter out of salvaged junk and had the courage to use it despite having no idea what trap or enemy might be waiting.

No-one understood that she had almost single-handedly re-built civilisation in the Commonwealth and therefore had to understand several engineering disciplines irrespective of whether she had a formal doctorate

None of the Institute personnel realised that, with Liam's help, she had made use of the abandoned passages behind Biosicences to encircle the crops with a teleportation ring; that the planters were tagged with electronic markers; and that synths can carry quite a lot of stolen equipment and supplies whilst teleporting out of the Institute.

The synths, Binets and Mother reformed near some ruined houses on Spectacle Island. There they found a large facility ready and waiting for them – comfortable housing and spacious work areas surrounding extensive farmland already tilled to receive the new plants. 

For decades, the Institute had served Father's will and his vision of a perfect future – which largely meant a future where the Institute would step forth into a brave new world shaped into some sort of utopian paradise by the synths for their human masters. No doubt they expected to receive adulation and welcome from the joyous remainder of the human race.

Instead, those few whom Mother deemed worthy would serve a different vision of the future. Mother had already made a strong start on achieving her plan of a Commonwealth where everyone was included and welcomed irrespective of race or previous political alignment. Mother asked only that every person serve their communities fairly and treat everyone equally. Mother did not care if a person was a human or synth or ghoul; nor whether they had been farmers, mercenaries or raiders. She did not even exclude Supermutants in principle; indeed one of them lived at the Minuteman headquarters at the Castle.

In the years to come, long after the Institute remnant had died forgotten in their underground tomb, the Commonwealth would flourish as a beacon of civilisation.


End file.
